Sea Legs
by Eatsscissors
Summary: Sawyer has a hard time finding his feet sometimes.


TITLE: Sea Legs

AUTHOR: Mari

RATING: PG to PG-13 at the highest.

PAIRING: Jack/Sawyer

DISCLAIMER: Ain't my sandbox.

SPOILERS: None specific.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is for AllieCat, whose birthday was tragically a month ago, but I am terrible at getting these things out on time. Hope you like it, sweetie!

It didn't look as if it was getting any smaller. That was going to be a real problem, because a certain lack of getting smaller meant a lack of going away, and if there was one thing that Sawyer figured that he could not take it was any more time spent in the presence of that island-in the presence of _either_ of those islands. He was liable to go picking up some of Rousseau's dynamite from the Black Rock and burying it at completely random places in the earth, just so that he could see random pieces of the island blow sky-high. Hurt the bitch in any way that he could. It occurred to Sawyer that she was more likely than not going to swat back at him if he did such a thing, and she had a much bigger and meaner fist than he did. Sawyer figured that his life would have run a lot differently if he had been the sort to fully scope out the lay of the land before he leapt. Or even to give the barest of glances to the lay of the land before he leapt.

"You all right, man?" came the voice from behind him, all full of good humor and warmth now that the crown of leadership had been lifted from his head and given back to someone else's. A small, pleasurable shiver ran down Sawyer's back to hear it. He stopped it before Jack could see. Wouldn't do to let the doc go getting all full of himself, now would it? Sawyer would have to go pushing his pretty ass overboard if such a thing where to happen, and that would just be a shame for everyone involved.

Jack put his hand against the small of Sawyer's back as he came closer to make sure that Sawyer wasn't about to have a fit or something right there in the middle of the cramped room. There were calluses on the tips of his fingers and a warm, steady heat radiating out from the center of his palm. To hell with controlling his betraying shiver, it was all that Sawyer could do not to outright sigh. "Fine," he answered Jack at long last. If his voice was a little raspy around the edges, well, hell. Everyone had been yelping and hollering and all but turning cartwheels up and down the beach at the very first sight of that boat creeping over the horizon. For all that Jack knew, Sawyer's throat was just a little raw from where he had started to leap up and down and carry on like an overexcited seven year-old right along with the rest of them. It didn't mean a thing.

Jack's eyes were a little smug as he leaned forward to peer out of the tiny window to see what was occupying so much of Sawyer's attention. Damn it. He had cleaned up and shaved, so that smelling faintly of soap and wearing a borrowed pair of the captain's clothes, he could be any man on the street back in the real world. Any man on the street, and he looked I good /I . Sawyer guessed that that answered the question of whether this thing, this he-and-Jack thing, as most people didn't even bother mentioning their names in separate breaths any more, was real.

"You think that the island's really getting smaller?" Sawyer asked so that Jack would not notice how his breath had suddenly gone ragged there for a second. "It should be getting smaller if we're pulling away, right?"

Giving Sawyer a confused, tolerant look-a familiar look, a _lover's_ look-Jack leaned nearer to the window so that he could see for himself. "Sawyer," he said calmly, in a voice suggesting that he was merely waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Sawyer to push him out of the tiny window. Never mind that it was way too small and didn't open, and that Sawyer had yet to master the art of defying the laws of physics in any case. The power of Sawyer's stubborn had ways of getting things done, everyone on the island knew that. "It's about half the size that it used to be."

"Well, it don't _look_ it," the power of Sawyer's island-renowned (and soon to be world-renowned, once they got back to the mainland and the media feasted their eyes upon a whole gaggle of Lazaruses walking blinking from their tombs) stubborn made him point out, though he could still feel a faint blush creeping up his neck. "It's not like we're trying to get by on wind power, anyway, can't this damned thing manage to go any faster than five miles an hour? At the rate that we're going, we might as well stick our hands over the side and paddle our way back home." At that moment, the ship gave a particularly hard lurch that made Sawyer grab quickly for the wall or risk falling, feeling gorge rising in his throat. If asked to say what he hated more, the ship or that sulking green bitch out beyond it, Sawyer could have been hard-pressed to give an answer.

Jack had up to that point been busily staring at Sawyer as if he did not know which to check for first, a concussion or a fever. Had he tried either of those things, Sawyer decided, the doctor _would_ have gotten himself thrown out of the window. "What in the-" Jack began, and then shut his mouth abruptly. There was a gleam to his eye that Sawyer did not like at all. "Sawyer, are you afraid of _boats_?"

Right out of that damned window, Sawyer decided, ass over teakettle until he hit the sea. The laws of physics couldn't be _that_ rigid.

"Maybe," he answered gruffly.

Jack continued to stare at him. Sawyer had always maintained that anyone who denied that the doc had a generous helping of son of a bitch in him was all caught up in some pretty image and didn't know the man at all. He looked as if Christmas had come early. "You're afraid of boats," Jack repeated, as if it would become less incredible the more often that he repeated it.

Sawyer felt his scowl deepen. "You say that like its something all weird that needs to be kept secret, like I'm afraid of doorknobs," he snapped. "Being afraid of boats is completely normal. They flip over, they go off course…" The dark lady hovering out in the water to the south of them and not falling beyond the horizon line nearly fast enough for Sawyer's liking, no matter what Jack said, could reach them even as they chugged away out here.

"You were in a _plane_ crash," Jack told him. He sounded a few steps away from asking Sawyer as if he had forgotten. Yeah, like there was any way that any of them could.

"You don't see me hopping on any 747s, do you?" Sawyer shot back. He could still feel the extra blood in his face and neck, turning him pink and hot. "Not all of us learned how to walk on the decks of yachts, jackass."

Jack made a face at him. It was, God help them all, actually _cute_. "I'm not rich, you redneck," Jack told him without sounding actually angry. They both knew that Sawyer would stop calling Jack a spoiled little rich boy on the same day that Jack quit calling him an ignorant redneck. It was when they started calling each other baby and darling that they knew they were having a fight. Jack's grin was almost devilish. Sawyer didn't need to turn his head to see it; he could feel the heat on the side of his face. The doc didn't smile nearly often enough.

"I rode in kayaks," Jack continued.

Sawyer groaned. Great. He had hooked up with someone who actually _picked_ the boats that liked to flip over. "So long as you don't expect me to go on your damned idiot jaunts with you," he said over his shoulder.

Jack stepped closer, closed his arms around Sawyer's waist, and rested his chin against Sawyer's shoulder. His jaw and his arms alike were warm, familiar weights; it was still all that Sawyer could do, even after all of this time, not to flinch the sensation away before it became too great. Sensing the tension, Jack moved his arm so that he could give Sawyer's stomach a sarcastic little pat. Sawyer rolled his eyes and wondered if it would count as abuse if he drove his elbow backwards and into Jack's stomach.

"How do you get on a homemade raft if you're so scared of boats, anyway?" Jack continued. With his chin still resting against Sawyer's shoulder, his mouth was nearly level with the curve of Sawyer's ear. "Masochism?"

That verged upon being outright mean and they both knew it. As such, Sawyer did not feel guilty for finally giving in to the urge to put his elbow back and into the flesh of Jack's stomach, much tanner and firmer than it had been when their plane had fallen out of the sky a year before. Jack made an oofing sound before he caught at Sawyer's elbow and said in a reproving tone, "Not nice."

"You forget who you're sleeping with?" Sawyer retorted. He turned his head to meet Jack's eyes and nearly wound up on his mouth instead, as Jack still had not moved his chin. His eyes were liquid dark, letting Sawyer know with a glance that he had not forgotten who he was sleeping with. "Didn't say that I liked the boat," Sawyer said. There was a gruff note in his voice that he could not quite control, so he cleared his throat instead. It might be a good idea if the two of them went up for some air, because Sawyer's masochistic tendencies were not feeling quite strong enough today to give that cramped, narrow bed a whirl. "Liked the island even less."

Jack's eyes darkened even further, for all of the wrong reasons, and his lips pressed themselves together into that thin line that Sawyer hated. He did not like it when Sawyer talked about the island and the tendrils of power that he could feel coiling up from its soil sometimes, the only pulse within a hundred miles that was beyond Jack's ability to find. After spending months thinking that the Others had launched a nefarious plan to make him go quietly insane even before he faced that look in Jack's eyes, Sawyer tended not to talk about it very much.

"Come on," Jack said abruptly, pulling his chin away from Sawyer's shoulder and releasing the arms that he had locked around his waist. A small part of Sawyer mourned the loss of contact, while a larger part of him was more interested in what the hell the doc was up to now.

"Why?" he asked as he turned away from the cabin window and felt his eyebrow quirking upwards.

"If you don't trust me by now, then that sounds like your damage, not mine," Jack said. He gave Sawyer's arm a friendly swat. "Come on."

He could follow the doc and see what fresh and possibly entertaining batch of insanity that he had gotten into, or he could stay here and stare at the possibly anthropomorphic and definitely not friendly island until his hair fell out and he turned into Locke himself. When put that way, one of these options was starting to look much more attractive than the other.

Sawyer followed Jack out onto the deck of the ship, which was packed with people. Though it was not a small vessel, the only reason that Sawyer had been able to find a few moments of privacy below at all was due to the fact that most of their company was still too wound up by the fact that the impossible had happened-rescue at last-to really begin exploring yet. Jack paused beside Sawyer as they emerged onto the deck and automatically began to run his eyes across the assembled throng. His eyes had started to darken again in that way that Sawyer did not like at all. It was so much better when they did it out of lust, but even Sawyer had to admit that they were in something of crowded circumstances at the moment.

Knowing that Jack was tallying up the list of the dead in his head while he was looking at the living and that he could keep this up for the next hour if he was allowed to, Sawyer touched lightly at his arm. "I could have gotten air down in the cabin, if that's all that you thought I needed."

Jack managed to look annoyed and grateful for the rescue at the same time and in equal measure. He dragged his hand across the back of his neck and said, "Yeah, thanks. This way." He led Sawyer through a crowd of people who wanted down to the last to touch him on the shoulder or clap him on the back, the leader who on frequently more than his own considerable ability to dig his heels into the ground and make a mule look tractable by comparison had gotten them through. Sawyer noticed that Jack handled all of this with far more grace than he would have once upon a time, but a future in politics was probably out of the question. They shouldered their way through the crush of bodies and made it to the deck railing at last. Though he would not admit it, Sawyer had been starting to feel a touch claustrophobic in the crowd and had been thinking longingly of the empty cabin that he had allowed Jack to coax him out of before they made their way through it. Leave it to him to wait until they were actually off of the island before he began his prospective future as a hermit.

"Here," Jack said at last when they reached the railing. The island did not look any closer or farther away from up here, only meaner, while every wave that slapped against the hull of the ship as it motored along sounded like an advance scout readying for the main force's attack. Sawyer took a deep breath that was intended to steady him and did no such thing and stepped back from the railing. The movements of the ship were if anything even more pronounced up here than they had been down below, and he had not exactly been having a ball then. "Doc, you got a sadistic streak to you that you really ought to be concerned about," he managed.

Jack looked first confused and then managed, to his credit, a passable stab at even appearing remorseful before he reached out and grabbed at Sawyer's wrist so that he could pull him close again. Though Sawyer glared hard, Jack had long ago developed an immunity to that particular super power. "Trust me," he said.

_Now_ Sawyer really wanted to run back into the cabin and hide there, and not merely because looking at the motions of the whitecaps as they were born and died and were born again was making his stomach feel queasy. He could feel the movement of the ship more acutely up here than he could down below, but that was not it, either. The hell of it was that Jack knew, too; for all that he could slam down a smooth blank mask over his emotions when he was playing cards, the whole world could see every thought that was running through his mind everywhere else. If Jack chose this as one of those moments when he blurted out an inconvenient emotional truth, either because he thought that Sawyer needed to hear it or because he really was as big a son of a bitch as Sawyer liked to call him, then Sawyer swore that he was going to push him overboard.

"You just have to find your sea legs," Jack continued, refusing to release his grip upon Sawyer's wrist even though Sawyer had obliged him by drawing close. His thumb stroked against the pulse point as he spoke. There were more calluses on Jack's hands than there had once been, a product of the hours of weapons handling and long work that had been required to keep their camp running and defend it from the Others, and Sawyer knew them all.

"Don't think that I packed those with me before the plane went down, doc," Sawyer said, wetting his lips. "And I sure as hell know that they weren't for sale on Craphole."

Jack's eyebrow went up as Sawyer used Shannon's old moniker for the island, as if asking if that was really the best that Sawyer could do, while a brief shadow crossed his face at the mention of Shannon at all. He was a complicated man. Sawyer noticed in the meanwhile that Jack was shifting his weight lightly from one foot to the other in keeping time with the way that the ship was moving, so that he might as well be standing on dry land. Seeing him doing that so effortlessly while Sawyer was still struggling with the urge to run back inside so that at least he would not have to _see_ the ocean pitching and rolling all around him was not doing wonders to erase Sawyer's urge to push the doc right overboard. Someone was bound to fish him out eventually.

"Like this," Jack said, still refusing to release Sawyer's wrist, as he exaggerated his movements so that Sawyer could see that he was not doing anything more complicated than staying in tune to the ship from one moment to the next. Reacting on the fly. Sawyer seemed to recall that this was something that he had a knack for, or had at some point.

"Bullshit you learned this in a friggin' kayak," he muttered to Jack as he curved his fingers back around to touch at Jack's own wrist. For a few seconds, their pulses were beating in tandem.

A smile curved Jack's face. "Maybe I was on a yacht once or twice," he admitted.

"I knew it. You wasn't born to be a liar." While their heartbeats were still resting against one another, Sawyer took a deep breath and asked, "Sea legs, huh?"

"Just a matter of getting acclimated," Jack answered back.

Sawyer glanced over his shoulder at the island and the dark, hulking waves that radiated out from her before he took a deep breath and very deliberately turned his back on it. They had to get out of range soon or later. Meanwhile, Sawyer continued to caress at Jack's fingers with his own. They seemed to like it, and caressed back. "Okay, then. Let's give 'er a whirl."

End


End file.
